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[Nabokov: The New Yorker's Archives
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Timely notes from The New Yorker's archive.
March 1, 2010 :Eighty-Five from the Archive: Vladimir Nabokov
Eighty-Five from the Archive: Vladimir Nabokov By Jon Michaud
This year is The New Yorker's eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine's history. The issue containing that day's selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day's selection is posted.
In a Comment on the death of Vladimir Nabokov, in 1977, John Updike wrote, The least of his writings offered a bygone sort of delight: a sorcerer's scintillant dignity made of every sentence a potentially magic occasion.
That Nabokovian magic manifested itself more than fifty times in the pages of The New Yorker, including today's selection, "Pnin's Day" from the issue of April 23, 1955. Here Nabokov describes the difficulties Professor Timofey Pnin, a Russian professor at the fictional Waindell College, experiences with his adopted language:
The organs concerned with the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the vellum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and last, but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon the jaw's overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If Pnin's Russian was music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty ("dzeefeecooltsee," in Pninian English) with depalatization, never managing to remove the extra Russian moisture from "t"s and "d"s before the vowels he so quaintly softened. His explosive "hat" ("I never go in a hat, even in winter") differed from the common American pronunciation of the adjective "hot" (typical of Waindell townspeople, for example) only by its briefer duration, and thus sounded very much like the German verb "hat" (has). Long "o"s with him inevitably became short ones, his "no"acquiring for the nonce the rounded orifice of a British or Bostonian "o" in "not," and this was accentuated by his Russian trick of duplicating the simple negative. ("May I give you a lift, Mr. Pnin?" "No-no, I have only two paces from here.") He did not possess (nor was he aware of this lack) any long "oo;" all he could muster when called upon to utter "noon" was the lax "o" sound of the German "nun" ("I have no classes in afternun on Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.")
Three other excepts from Nabokov's novel "Pnin" appeared in the magazine: "Pnin," "Victor Meets Pnin," and "Pnin Gives a Party." For more on Nabokov, there's also Anthony Lane's "From Russia with Love," Roger Angell's "Lo Love, High Romance," and Stacy Schiff's "The Genius and Mrs. Genius."
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